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The Extended Mind
In philosophy of mind, the extended mind thesis (EMT) says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world. The EMT proposes that some objects in the external environment can be part of a cognitive process and in that way function as extensions of the mind itself. Examples of such objects are written calculations, a diary, or a PC; in general, it concerns objects that store information. The EMT considers the mind to encompass every level of cognition, including the physical level. The EMT was proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in "The Extended Mind" (1998). They describe the idea as "active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes." For the matter of personal identity (and the philosophy of self), the EMT has the implication that some parts of a person's identity can be determined by their environment. __TOC__ "The Extended Mind" "The Extended Mind" by A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philosophy Of Mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states.Siegel, S.: ''The Contents of Visual Experience''. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010.Macpherson, F. & Haddock, A., editors, ''Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental property, mental properties, consciousness and neural correlates of consciousness, its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body. Dualism (philosophy of mind), Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem, although nuanced vie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark Rowlands
Mark Rowlands (born 1962) is a Welsh writer and philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, and the author of several books on the philosophy of mind, the moral status of non-human animals, and cultural criticism. He is known within academic philosophy for his work on the animal mind and is one of the principal architects of the view known as vehicle externalism, or the extended mind, the view that thoughts, memories, desires and beliefs can be stored outside the brain and the skull. His works include ''Animal Rights'' (1998), ''The Body in Mind'' (1999), ''The Nature of Consciousness'' (2001), ''Animals Like Us'' (2002), and a personal memoir, ''The Philosopher and the Wolf'' (2008). Rowlands was born in Newport, Wales and began his undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of Manchester before changing to philosophy. He took his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford, and has held various academic positions in philosophy in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Situated Cognition
Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts. Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift from empiricism, situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context. Instead knowing exists, ''in situ'', inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context. History While situated cognition gained recognition in the field of educational psychology in the late twentieth century,Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989 it shares many principl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Landauer's Principle
Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment".. Another way of phrasing Landauer's principle is that if an observer loses information about a physical system, heat is generated and the observer loses the ability to extract useful work from that system. A so-called logically reversible computation, in which no information is erased, may in principle be carried out without releasing any heat. This has led to considerable interest in the study of reversible computing. Indeed, without reversible computing, increases in the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated must eventually come to a halt. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Extelligence
Extelligence is a term coined by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen in their 1997 book ''Figments of Reality''. They define it as the cultural capital that is available to us in the form of external media (e.g. tribal legends, folklore, nursery rhymes, books, videotapes, CD-ROMs, etc.) They contrast extelligence with intelligence, or the knowledge and cognitive processes within the brain. Furthermore, they regard the 'complicity' of extelligence and intelligence as fundamental to the development of consciousness in evolutionary terms for both the species and the individual. 'Complicity' is a combination of complexity and simplicity, and Cohen and Stewart use it to express the interdependent relationship between knowledge-inside-one's-head and knowledge-outside-one's-head that can be readily accessed. Although Cohen's and Stewart's respective disciplines are biology and mathematics, their description of the complicity of intelligence and extelligence is in the tradition of Jean Piaget, Be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Enactivism
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: ''they enact a world''." These authors su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Embodied Cognition
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. Sensory and motor systems are seen as fundamentally integrated with cognitive processing. The cognitive features include high-level mental constructs (such as concepts and Categorization, categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built into the organism's functional structure. The embodied mind thesis challenges other theories, such as Cognitivism (psychology), cognitivism, computationalism, and Dualism (philosophy of mind), Cartesian dualism. It is closely related to the extended mind thesis, situated cognition, and enactivism. The modern version depends on insights drawn from up to date research in psychology, linguistics, cogni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Distributed Cognition
Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s. From cognitive ethnography, Hutchins argues that mental representations, which classical cognitive science held that are within the individual brain, are actually distributed in sociocultural systems that constitute the tools to think and perceive the world. Thus, a native of the Carolina Islands can perceive the sky and organize his perceptions of the constellations typical of his culture (the groupings of stars are different than in the traditional constellations of the West) and use the position of the stars in the sky as a map to orient himself in space while sailing overnight in a canoe. According to Hutchins, cognition involves not only the brain but also external artifacts, work teams made up of several people, and cultural systems for interpreting reality (mythical, scientific, or otherwise). Distributed cognition theory is part ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson maintains a steady course in a changing environment by adjusting their steering in continual response to the effect it is observed as having. Cybernetics is concerned with circular causal processes such as steering however they are embodied,Ashby, W. R. (1956). An introduction to cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall, p. 1. including in ecological, technological, biological, cognitive, and social systems, and in the context of practical activities such as designing, learning, managing, conversation, and the practice of cybernetics itself. Cybernetics' transdisciplinary and "antidisciplinary" character has meant that it intersects with a number of other fields, leading to it having both wide influence and diverse interpretations. Cybernetics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Enaction
Enactive interfaces are interactive systems that allow organization and transmission of knowledge obtained through action. Examples are interfaces that couple a human with a machine to do things usually done unaided, such as shaping a three-dimensional object using multiple modality interactions with a database, or using interactive video to allow a student to visually engage with mathematical concepts. Enactive interface design can be approached through the idea of raising awareness of affordances, that is, optimization of the awareness of possible actions available to someone using the enactive interface. This optimization involves visibility, affordance, and feedback. The enactive interface in the figure interprets manual input and provides a response in perceptual terms in the form of images, sounds, and haptic (tactile) feedback. The system is called enactive because of the feedback loop in which the system response is decided by the user input, and the user input is driven by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qualia
In philosophy of mind, qualia ( or ; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term ''qualia'' derives from the Latin neuter plural form (''qualia'') of the Latin adjective '' quālis'' () meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific this particular apple now". Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of ''pain'' of a headache, the ''taste'' of wine, as well as the ''redness'' of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that ''qualia'' was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us". Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
